Just one week before the Apple media event, the staff members of Beeep caught what might have been the 4-inch iPhone SE – or a very detailed knockoff – in the wild over in Huaqiangbei Shenzhen China, the so-called “silicon valley of hardware”.

Last summer, Intel announced 3D Xpoint, a new class of memory labeled as a “major breakthrough in memory process technology.” 3D Xpoint is 1,000 times faster and more durable than NAND Flash storage, as well as 10 times denser than the DRAM chips used in computers.

The transistor-free cross point architecture essentially creates a three-dimensional checkerboard withers memory cells sit at the intersection of word lines and bit lines, allowing the cells to be addressed individually. As a result, data can be written and read in small sizes, leading to faster and more efficient read/write processes.

Intel had stated that the first 3D Xpoint product would be solid in early 2016 and marketed under the product name of its “Octane solid state drives”. Interestingly enough, 3D Xpoint is compatible with NVM Express (NVMe), an SSD protocol that offers improved latency and performance over the older AHCI protocol.